


my kind of sucker punch

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - School, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Break Up, Charles Is a Darling, Erik is a darling, First Meetings, Gen, Gossip, Male-Female Friendship, Smile, Teen Angst, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:33:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone might be clueless in high school - even when it's a high school attended by humans and mutants - but Erik gets hit with a clue-by-four because his friends love him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my kind of sucker punch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts).



> Marked as "Underage" only because everyone here is 16 or thereabouts.

The first thing Emma does when Erik arrives at their usual table for lunch is pull a horrible face at him, well-maintained hands contorting her cheeks and mouth into an expression that is both hilarious and unexpectedly scary - and the thing is, she really is using her hands because he can feel the movement of the heavy bracelet encircling her left wrist, which means that there’s something serious going on because Emma can very easily project her thoughts and the images that she wants people to see of herself.

For her to be reacting to Erik, visibly, physically, only happens when the situation is really serious.

He doesn’t know when the situation got serious because _he just got here_ , stars’ sake, he hasn’t even had a chance to investigate his lunch tray yet.

Erik is not a fan of being left in the dark.

“Do that again,” Angel says as she squeezes in on Emma’s left side, “I want to take a photo of it.”

Emma grins and obliges her, then turns the expression back on Erik for the second time, before she clears her throat and folds her hands on the tabletop. “I trust you’ve been sufficiently warned?” she asks, arch and amused and also concerned.

Erik growls and pushes his pudding cup over to Moira when she sits down on Emma’s right side. “About _what_.”

“Thank you,” Moira says, and then adds, “Emma, be nice to him, tell him why you’re trying to scare him _before_ you actually scare him.”

“She doesn’t scare me,” Erik says, and Emma rides roughshod right over him and says, “Well, he’s easy to scare, I like seeing him scared.”

“Emma,” Angel says, even if she’s fighting off a grin.

“Oh, all right,” Emma says, and looks right at Erik. Her skin glitters, just a little - she’s just on the knife-edge between being flesh and blood and being organic diamond. “Lehnsherr. What, exactly, do you know about Charles Xavier?”

 _“Who?”_ Erik asks, and then he nearly rears back in surprise when all three girls glare at him in response. “What’d I do? What’s wrong with not recognizing a name?”

“Do you know, I actually think you’re telling the truth,” Emma says after a long, charged moment, during which she flickers in and out of her diamond form - and if Erik is utterly ignorant about people at this school he is very well-versed in Emma’s body language, and when she does the flickering thing it usually means that something bad is about to go down.

He does the smart thing, which is brace his feet and get a better grip on all of the metal in their vicinity. Maybe they won’t all be getting into another one of their customary lunchtime almost-arguments, but he’d rather like to be prepared, thank you very much.

Erik watches the three girls confer in whispers, impatient, and fights off the urge to tug on Moira’s watch and Angel’s dog tags.

He knows better than to manipulate Emma’s jewelry; she can make him dance, and he’s not a dancer, and Emma has a terrible, fiendish sense of humor.

Finally, Moira sighs and starts in on the pudding cup, explaining between spoonfuls. “Charles Xavier,” she says again. “He’s in Raven’s class. Head of the chess team. Marathon runner. Just missed being elected to the student council.”

“Brown hair, blue eyes, and - oh yeah - he’s the strongest damn telepath in the school,” Angel says. “Like, strong enough to talk to everyone all at the same time without breaking a sweat. And we’re talking about everyone in this school, students _and_ faculty.”

“Again,” Erik says, “what about him? Why are you talking to me about him?”

“Because, Erik,” Emma says, drawing out her words in a way that makes him bristle because he’s not going to be talked down to, not even by any of his best friends, “that happens to be the very same guy you stumbled upon on the bleachers last week.” 

Stumbled upon? Erik thinks about what the girls have told him - blue eyes, bleachers - and in the next second the rest of the memory hits him like a fist between the eyes. He remembers an overcast sky, and a chess board, and a vacuum flask full of some very milky tea - and, more vividly now, he remembers a conversation full of witticisms and sarcasm and what was very nearly the most beautiful smile that Erik had ever seen in his life (not counting Edie, of course, no one on this planet was ever going to be more beautiful than his mother, and he doesn’t care who knows that).

He thinks about that smile again: tentative at first, just a hint of it appearing in the faint lines around the other boy’s mouth. Flash and flicker, and the moment when Erik closed his eyes to laugh, but not without catching how Charles almost covered his face. He remembers that that was why he’d given in to the impulse to laugh out loud, to really show his appreciation for the joke, as strange and barbed as it was - his laughter and Charles’s grin in reply, tentative and then growing until he was lit up and incendiary.

A smile that had made Erik catch his breath, that had made him feel like he’d been walloped across the back of the head.

How he manages to keep his feelings secret from the three he’ll never know - they’re just staring at him with various degrees of blankness.

“That was Charles Xavier?” Erik asks, and this time he knows he sounds like he’s boggling, though he isn’t sure if he’s boggling at the girls or himself or at the other telepath.

“Yep,” Angel says. “One and the same. And everyone saw the two of you out there. Well, everyone who matters, so practically the entire school knows by now.”

He thinks he should be defensive, but he cannot find it in himself to do so; he just feels lost and curious at the same time. “So?”

Emma raises an eyebrow at him. “Erik. He doesn’t smile at anyone. Not ever. Not even at the people he dates.”

“None of you are making sense,” Erik exclaims after a moment. “So what if he doesn’t smile? Are we policing people for that now? _I_ don’t smile very often, not even for you guys, are you talking about that behind my back?”

“Yes,” Moira says as she reaches for half of Angel’s sandwich.

Erik blinks, but manages to get back on track. “It’s still none of our business.”

“Maybe,” Emma hedges, but in the way that means she has something else to say - and sure enough, she tilts her head and looks Erik in the eyes and flashes him a thought: _What I’m about to tell you is - well, I do know how to keep secrets. This is one of them._

Before Erik can think to complain about what she’s doing the image crashes into his head, wholesale: familiar blue eyes in an unfamiliar expression. Glittering like ice, utterly blank, wide open, dark with self-loathing.

 _What the_ fuck _?_ Erik sends to Emma.

“Language,” Emma says. 

Erik takes a moment to catch his breath, and then: “Who did that to him? And how did you know about it?” 

“Big breakup,” Moira says. “In public. Out loud.”

“I don’t remember this,” Erik says.

“You weren’t here,” Angel says. “MoMA field trip...”

Erik blinks again. “But that was two weeks ago.”

“I’m still not seeing that light bulb, Lehnsherr, where are your brains right now,” Emma says - but quietly, gently. Soberly, to match the grave look in her eyes, and in Moira’s, and in Angel’s. “Let us help you put it all together, all right? Charles Xavier. Telepath. He keeps to himself. He is capable of great kindness, and also, as you have just seen, great hurt.”

“We can only observe him from afar,” Angel says, “and we only have the stories from others to go on with. He cares very deeply for the things that are important to him.”

Moira takes up the story in turn: “For people who are important to him. But from all reports, that’s the problem. He gives so much, gives everything, and no one knows that that’s what’s happening until something goes wrong and it all blows up in his face.”

“I’m not going to say anything about that very public confrontation other than that the girl was at fault for one thing and one thing only: you don’t ever do that sort of thing out where everyone can hear you. And we were sitting right here when it started, not more than twenty feet away.” Emma looks disapproving anyway, eyebrows pulled into a straight line, even as she points to one of the other tables. “Maybe he deserved it; maybe not. Maybe she did it so people would sympathize with her against the guy who can read minds. Either way, it was bad form for her to do that - as Moira put it - out loud.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Angel says, and sighs, and leans on Emma’s shoulder.

“He’s been alone, or he has been as he has been before then, and since then - until you,” Moira says. “Until you very publicly showed him that you could tolerate his company, carry on a conversation with him, amuse him enough to make him _smile_.” She looks serious for a moment, and then throws him a familiar grin, something genuine. “There are many of us who might have wanted to know how that happened - so we can do it ourselves.”

Erik scowls at her, until she scowls right back, at which point he rolls his eyes and magnanimously ignores Angel’s malicious chuckle. 

But when they’re all sober again, Erik levitates a handful of small gears from his pocket and lets them dance around his hand in midair. The whirling motions throw weak reflections of light in all directions, and help him focus his mind. “I’d do it again if I could. If I knew how. Make him smile,” he says, slowly, contemplatively.

He thinks about that afternoon: the breeze that made it necessary for Charles to sit on his hands because he didn’t like getting cold. Green grass, wide white lines across the neatly manicured turf. A faraway kite tossing in the clouds, bright red trailing purple and blue streamers. He remembers grinning and pointing it out and mocking the terrible color combination. Charles playing a particularly persnickety variation on the Sicilian Defence.

Erik thinks that Charles made him laugh far more often than he did Charles, and thinks - now as then - that there was still something unfair about that; that there was an imbalance that he needed to look into, because Charles grinned like unexpected sunshine in the winter, and like a triumphant cloudburst in the summer.

He almost wants to make faces at the girls when he realizes they’ve been listening in, all three of them, through Emma.

But instead of making fun, the blonde simply says, quietly, almost fondly, “And on that note....”

The tone of her voice is already more than enough to surprise Erik, but that’s nothing compared to her smile: the benign expression is absolutely unlike anything he’s ever seen before on her. He knows what she looks like when she’s being sympathetic, and when she’s being particularly malicious, and he likes her when she unsheathes her claws, so much so that seeing her in the opposite condition makes the hair on the back of his neck rise.

And - actually, the seraphic look is catching, and Erik stares suspiciously from one girl to another as they get up from the bench - until he clocks the _other_ reason why he’s feeling like something might be watching him.

Because someone _is_ there, and he doesn’t even have to look at the reflections that Emma throws off as she flashes into diamond form to know who is standing behind him. 

The three girls walk away, hand-in-hand.

Erik takes a deep breath and turns around, slowly, and offers Charles a grin: sheepish, happy, welcoming, somewhat embarrassed, the whole of it topped off with self-consciousness and rough good humor.

He looks at Charles as Charles stares at him for a moment.

When Charles’s mental presence reaches in his direction Erik thinks, as loudly as he can, _Stay stay welcome talk to me I’m here._

He also thinks, half-hopefully, half-knowing he’ll be rejected, _Smile for me?_

Charles tilts his head at Erik, consideringly, and says, “If you’ll keep smiling for me.”

“I will - but why, if I could ask?” Erik asks as he watches Charles sit next to him, so close, back to the table, while Erik is still sitting facing the empty bench that the girls left behind.

Charles bites his lip and looks down at his hands twisted together in his lap - but he offers a quiet chuckle and thinks, _I like your smile. It’s what I remembered from that afternoon. It’s_ all _I remember from our time together. You were so kind to me. You smiled at me. I couldn’t forget._

“I - ” And prudently, Erik shuts up - he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and then looks at Charles - and smiles.

Charles’s answering smile is sweet and slow and steady.


End file.
